Culture
Some cultural historians believe that the adjective "elfin" came to be used to describe the facial features of people with Williams syndrome because, before Williams syndrome's scientific cause was understood, people believed that sufferers of the syndrome, who have very charming and extraordinarily kind personalities in comparison to most people, were gifted with extraordinary, even magical, powers. This is often believed to be the origin of the folklore of elves, fairies and other forms of the 'good people' or 'wee folk' present in English folklore. Even though they are often described in the literature as "elfin-faced", Steven Pinker says in The Language Instinct that to him they often appear "more like Mick Jagger".
In a large review of the symptoms and features of the disorder, physicians Laskari, Smith, and Graham emphasized that family members of individuals with Williams syndrome typically reject use of terminology such as "elfin", as well as descriptions of social symptoms as "Cocktail Party Syndrome". Physicians, family members of individuals with Williams syndrome, and Williams syndrome associations alike have called for the curtailment of such terms.
Read more about this topic: Williams Syndrome
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)